It's been years and years since I last went trawling for webcomics worth reading, so it's time for an update: obviously online search is pretty much useless, but we ought to be able to crowdsource something here.
I keep a separate browser window for webcomics; here's a selection of my currently-open tabs, excluding syndicated stuff that shows up in newspapers. (So no "This Modern World" or "The Far Side".) What am I ignoring? Preferably new in the past decade, which rules out old-timers like "Digger" or "Girl Genius" (arguably I should have ommitted QC and xkcd too, but they're favourites of mine).
Questionable Content has been first on my daily reading list for a long time ... almost 20 years? It's Jeff Jacques' "internet comic strip about friendship, romance, and robots ... set in the present day and pretty much the same as our own except there are robots all over the place and giant space stations." And more plot threads than I can possibly summarize, given that it's a sprawling soap opera unfolding at roughly 250 strips per year.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal which, despite the name, comes out almost every day, is the antithesis of QC: every daily strip is a standalone, and it has an alarming tendency to lob philosophical hand grenades at entire fields of scientific endeavour. By Zack Weinersmith, who's also written some good books.
xkcd is the third classic, by sometime NASA robot guy Randal Munroe; like SMBC it tends to focus on the sciences, with a distinctly whimsical take on things. Should need no introduction, but if you don't already know, it's where those stick figure science comics come from ...
Kill Six Billion Demons Less of a single strip at a time webcomic and more of an episodic graphic novel, KSBD is distinctly Japanese/Hindu/Chinese/Hellish in tone: it seems to follow the travails of an American female student called Alison who winds up in hell, befriends demons, gets caught up in a holy war to end the universe, and ascends towards godhood, but that's kind of selling it short. Come for the amazing artwork, stay for the batshit theology. By Abbadon.
Pepper & Carrot by David Revoy is thematically the exact antithesis of KSBD: P&C is set in a very kitsch, cozy, D&D style generic fantasy world. Pepper is a young and less-than-competent student of witchcraft, and Carrot is her one-brain-cell ginger cat (and hapless familiar): they get in trouble a lot. (Spin-offs: if you want to dip in to a one-shot rather than a serial, there's Mini-Fantasy Theatre--same character but every story is self-contained.)
Runaway to the Stars is an extremely crunchy hard SF slice-of-life serial by Jay Eaton, following Talita (an alien centaur-oid alien fostered by humans) and her friends. Did I say "crunchy"? The world-building is extreme. (And you'll never think catgirls are sexy again!)
Phobos and Deimos A differently-crunchy solarpunk story about a girl from Mars who, exiled by an invasion, ends up as a refugee on Earth, where she has to make a new life for herself and grapple with the culture shock of attending high school in Antarctica as a 'fugee.
RuriDragon an online manga set in a Japanese high school, following student Ruri Aoki, who wakes up one day and notices horns have started growing from her head. When she asks her mother about it, mum confesses that her father was a dragon ... RuriDragon was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine in 2022; this is an unofficial fan translation. (It follows Japanese formatting conventions, so read it from the top down and right-to-left or the dialog won't make much sense.)
SideQuested by AlePresser & K.B. Spangler is a web serial/graphic novel in progress set in a slightly less generic fantasy realm than Pepper & Carrot (this one shows some signs of Xianxia/cultivation influences). It focusses on the adventures of an extremely sensible level-headed librarian-in-training girl named Charlie, who clearly has absolutely no magical abilities whatsoever--until one day her absentee father turns up with some unexpected news: he's the King's Champion, her mother is a foreign princess, and she's needed at Court because the King's head-in-the-clouds son Prince Leopold is being a problem and her father needs her to sort him out in a hurry ...
Eldritch Darling Nothing to see here, just your usual webcomic about an eldritch horror from beyond spacetime who falls in love with a lesbian. H. P. Lovecraft would not approve!
Unspeakable Vault of Doom is an irregular series of extremely goofy web strips that H. P. Lovecraft would definitely disapprove of, not least because he occasionally features in it, along with his more notorious creations!
Finally, two from the cheesecake dimension:
Oglaf is almost invariably NSFW, rude, and very, very funny. Weekly, started out 20 years ago as an attempt to do bad D&D porn then kind of wandered off topic, and these days there's only about an 80% probability that any given weekly strip will include explicit sex scenes, stabbings, or jokes.
Grrl Power (Caution: author has a severe male gaze problem) As the "about" page says: A comic about super heroines. Well there are guys too but mostly it's about the girls. Doing the things that super powered girls do. Fighting crime, saving the world, dating, shopping, etc. There are also explosions, cheesecake, beefcake, heroes and villains, angels and demons, cyborgs, probably ninjas, and definitely aliens. Lots and lots of aliens. Some of whom are only visiting Earth as sex tourists ...
And that's my round-up!
Your turn. What web comics do you frequent new webcomics that aren't on this list?


